Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 9:44 am Post subject: What about a new init system in Gentoo?

I don't know which init system Gentoo uses at the moment but i think it is the old sysvinit. What about a new beginning?
Sourcemage already uses simpleinit, Fedora Core 4 uses another init system too and runit is in portage already.
Ok it is a whole system change, all init Scripts will change and such tools like rc-update will change, too, but you can get a very fast boot und halt.
So are there any plans on the devel side?

Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 11:51 pm Post subject: Re: What about a new init system in Gentoo?

Russel-Athletic wrote:

I don't know which init system Gentoo uses at the moment but i think it is the old sysvinit. What about a new beginning?
Sourcemage already uses simpleinit, Fedora Core 4 uses another init system too and runit is in portage already.
Ok it is a whole system change, all init Scripts will change and such tools like rc-update will change, too, but you can get a very fast boot und halt.
So are there any plans on the devel side?

I'm game for the very fast boot and halt, although reboots are not common, when they do happen I like it to be over with fast so I don't have to listen to that little uptime daemon on my sholder say "YOU LET IT REBOOT???" for any longer then I have to.

We don't really use sysv init. The underlying basics are sysv, but the high level things are different. Named runlevels, automatic dependencies, parallel startup, ... . The rewrite in C that Azarah's working on is even sweeter.

We don't really use sysv init. The underlying basics are sysv, but the high level things are different. Named runlevels, automatic dependencies, parallel startup, ... . The rewrite in C that Azarah's working on is even sweeter.

yes, its sweet as it is. I guess, in the current framework, it should be possible to archieve the speedup that is gained with other new init systems.

We don't really use sysv init. The underlying basics are sysv, but the high level things are different. Named runlevels, automatic dependencies, parallel startup, ... . The rewrite in C that Azarah's working on is even sweeter.

yes, its sweet as it is. I guess, in the current framework, it should be possible to archieve the speedup that is gained with other new init systems.

Note that bringing up local as anything other than the last service is cheating, and mustn't be allowed to count when benchmarking.

Maybe I'am being a bit off base here, and people have much busier lives than myself but is speed of startup and shutdown really that important...I mean shaving 10 to 20 secs off of system boot time (if that) does not excite me.

rgds

TE

PS Besides which my current system boot is perfectly timed for me to have a yawn, cough, rub my eyes, light a smoke, cough again and have a scratch. A faster boot would just relieve me of having a scratch ............ which would make me grumpy for the rest of the day.

Maybe I'am being a bit off base here, and people have much busier lives than myself but is speed of startup and shutdown really that important...I mean shaving 10 to 20 secs off of system boot time (if that) does not excite me.

One problem with the current Gentoo init system is anything that starts at a runlevel isn't monitored and re-spawned if it dumps core. So a big benefit of a new init system would be automatic restarting of services that die.

runit and daemontools both provide this type of init environment. I'd love to see Gentoo use runit.

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Posted: Wed May 11, 2005 11:51 am Post subject: Re: What about a new init system in Gentoo?

Russel-Athletic wrote:

Fedora Core 4 uses another init system too

Fedora uses LSB conform SysVinit. They didn't switched their init system in the last couple of years. Actually they use SysVinit as long as I can remember.

They discussed initng on their mailing lists and rather quickly came to the conclusion that initng is neither much faster than sysvinit nor does it solve the fundamental problems their current init system has. Thus they won't switch. (sorry, no pointer to this discussion, you have to search their archive for yourself).

Posted: Wed May 11, 2005 9:35 pm Post subject: Re: What about a new init system in Gentoo?

asimon wrote:

They discussed initng on their mailing lists and rather quickly came to the conclusion that initng is neither much faster than sysvinit nor does it solve the fundamental problems their current init system has.

Not to flame or anything, but I have noticed a DRASTIC improvement in booting time using initng (after some tweaking of course ). My Pentium III 500Mhz laptop went from about a 2 minute boot to around 45 seconds to get into xfce4.2. My desktop Pent 4 2.4 is even better.

The biggest difference, however, is in shutdown time. My desktop would take around 30 seconds to shutdown with the default gentoo init, but with initng, would go from xfce (yeah i like it a bunch ) to off in 6 seconds flat. On the other hand, it is definitely VERY immature software, it lacks a lot of polish that is needed for a simple init service.

While I agree that startup and shutdown times are not the most crucial problems, especially for linux, the prospect of having monitored daemons that restart themselves is certainly nice.

Sorry to sound fanboyish, but I just got it working last night and am having tons of fun starting up and shutting down my boxes _________________Person me = new N00b();

Playing russian roulette with Reiser4 since 9/10/04.
Pentium 4 Northwood 2.4Ghz, NPTL, udev, initng, gentoo-sources-2.6.11-r6 with reiser4: How would you like to hardlock today?

Posted: Wed May 11, 2005 10:44 pm Post subject: Re: What about a new init system in Gentoo?

chrono325 wrote:

Not to flame or anything, but I have noticed a DRASTIC improvement in booting time using initng (after some tweaking of course ). My Pentium III 500Mhz laptop went from about a 2 minute boot to around 45 seconds to get into xfce4.2. My desktop Pent 4 2.4 is even better.

This is of course a big improvement. But just because a distro uses sysvinit doesn't mean it coudln't boot fast. There is quite some room for improvement to reduce the boot time with sysvinit too. I remember the tweaking of some Ubuntu devs (they blogged about it) who got their system to boot in under 30 seconds, with sysvinit. They patched X and gdm to dramatically reduce file lookups, used readahead, startet gdm earlier, and did some other tweaking.

chrono325 wrote:

The biggest difference, however, is in shutdown time. My desktop would take around 30 seconds to shutdown with the default gentoo init, but with initng, would go from xfce (yeah i like it a bunch ) to off in 6 seconds flat.

Very cool.

chrono325 wrote:

While I agree that startup and shutdown times are not the most crucial problems, especially for linux, the prospect of having monitored daemons that restart themselves is certainly nice.

Could be evil too. I hope it doesn't hide when something is fishy with a daemon and initng handles the situation when a daemon crashes every other minute. In this case one would typically prefer to shut it down and not get restarted constantly.

so, if you can speedup sysvinit in these certain ways, how fast must the bootup become if you do these things to initng ? this readahead thing, reducing of filelookups and so on must give gentoo the ability to fly, if applied to initng

Initng is looking for readahead optimization, has already a way to start gdm faster (instant-gdm)
and has REAL parallel loading. Also, is continuously tested with bootchartd to check the disk usage
and minimize the hard-disk idle times during boot.

For now is beta (some daemon lacking script, as lirc, bootsplash is not silent and tty1 stay unusable,
either u need to switch to tty2 with alt-F2 or auto-load kdm/gdm/xdm), but should really enter
in the supported software and then substitute sysvinit as it will becomes more stable._________________Every day a new distro comes to birth. Every day a distro "eats" another.
If you're born distro, no matter what, start to run.
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We don't really use sysv init. The underlying basics are sysv, but the high level things are different. Named runlevels, automatic dependencies, parallel startup, ... . The rewrite in C that Azarah's working on is even sweeter.

Is this usable now? Is this supposed to evenually replace the current init system in Gentoo?

We don't really use sysv init. The underlying basics are sysv, but the high level things are different. Named runlevels, automatic dependencies, parallel startup, ... . The rewrite in C that Azarah's working on is even sweeter.

Is this usable now? Is this supposed to evenually replace the current init system in Gentoo?

what about the startup/init tool Apple wrote? it is supposed to also replace cron, and be faster and easier to use than the current solutions.

apple works quite differently since it always boots to a graphical environment and uses some custom tools. and I don't think the init sequence would be able to replace the cron daemon (maybe it will start a service similar to cron?). Also, while it is faster and easier to use it may also be less flexible.

what about the startup/init tool Apple wrote? it is supposed to also replace cron, and be faster and easier to use than the current solutions.

apple works quite differently since it always boots to a graphical environment and uses some custom tools. and I don't think the init sequence would be able to replace the cron daemon (maybe it will start a service similar to cron?). Also, while it is faster and easier to use it may also be less flexible.

well, afaik, apple uses a daemon (like cron and xinetd) that replaces init, cron and xinetd - while mantaining their features. so it means 1 less daemon and no init system, but still all the flexibility. as they say. and they gave it away as free software, because they just thought it was better than the current solutions. so i wonder if someone that DOES know something about these kind'a things has seen it...

edit: i meant *I* don't know shit, not YOU don't know shit. just to be clear

I don't want to flame, but this can't pass in silence.
The theory "someone, somewhere might renders sysvinit faster" doesn't mean that someone will do.
Initng is much faster NOW. Has some (minor) glitches but ,hey! Is the sysvinit of tommorw NOW.

And ppl testing and working on it aren't thousands but they are givin concrete results...._________________Every day a new distro comes to birth. Every day a distro "eats" another.
If you're born distro, no matter what, start to run.
---- http://www.linuxprinting.org/ ---- http://tuxmobil.org/